External Validity - External Validity in Experiments

External Validity in Experiments

Many drawbacks can occur when following the experimental method. By the virtue of gaining enough control over the situation so as to randomly assign people to conditions and rule out the effects of extraneous variables, the situation can become somewhat artificial and distant from real life. There are two kinds of generalizability at issue:

  1. The extent to which we can generalize from the situation constructed by an experimenter to real-life situations (generalizability across situations), and
  2. The extent to which we can generalize from the people who participated in the experiment to people in general (generalizability across people)

Read more about this topic:  External Validity

Famous quotes containing the words external, validity and/or experiments:

    My grief lies all within,
    And these external manners of laments
    Are merely shadows to the unseen grief
    That swells with silence in the tortured soul.
    There lies the substance.
    William Shakespeare (1564–1616)

    There are ... two minimum conditions necessary and sufficient for the existence of a legal system. On the one hand those rules of behavior which are valid according to the system’s ultimate criteria of validity must be generally obeyed, and on the other hand, its rules of recognition specifying the criteria of legal validity and its rules of change and adjudication must be effectively accepted as common public standards of official behavior by its officials.
    —H.L.A. (Herbert Lionel Adolphus)

    My experiments did not turn out quite like yours, Henry. But science, like love, has her little surprises.
    William Hurlbut (1883–?)